Furthermore, just like any other required documentation it will turn into another useless nightmare for citizens. Before going you will need to scrounge up 100 documents and pictures, etc. Then you will need to make an appointment. Then you will have to pay some ludicrous processing fee. Then take a day off work to stand in line for a day and deal with some fat government slob, etc. Then wait an entire month to get the stupid thing (which means you won't be able to travel/get a job/drive/etc while you wait for a stinking month for them to make a laminated card.) And then God knows how many months it will take for those clowns to process a change of address/etc.
The PITA of a driver's license and a social security card should be enough to scare the living crap out of anyone with half a brain from wanting a national id card.

What sort of hell do you live in, friend? Here in Massachusetts the process to get a driver's license is painless: bring a few documents you already have and should keep well-filed (a paystub or bank statement, a passport or other state ID, that sort of stuff) to your local Registry of Motor Vehicles office, hit a few buttons on the automated kiosk, wait a few minutes in the chairs the provide and fill out the form if you haven't done so already, go up when they call your number, hand your stuff over, get a temporary ID. You'll get your real one in about week. I did this in November of last year; it took a total of 15 minutes. You can travel and get a job with your pre-existing documents and the temporary ID you get is for driving. What's the problem?
If my state can figure out how a deli works, why can't others?

Why the hell weren't these publicly available to begin with?
I see the article says "put online"; what does that mean? Were they available, just limited to microfilm or something like that? I hope they were freely available before.

NFS really is the best host out there for smaller sites. I use them to host a small message board (about a hundred members, maybe a dozen of which are active at any given time) and the cost is only $5-$10 a month, with much more reliable service than any random $4.99/month webhost. I'm not sure how well it scales up, but bugmenot.com is hosted by them.

It's only called "Chromium" because it's an unofficial build; once Google finally releases a GNU/Linux version it is expected that it will also be called Google Chrome. At least that's what the article implies.